The absolute irony of this comment :)

In fact, the best critics of something are often its biggest fans. Roger Ebert, for example, wrote some pretty critical pieces, but nobody can deny that he was driven primarily by a love of cinema. Or take politics: I've seen people complain that left-wing commentators were too critical of Biden when they should have been criticising Trump, but often it's easier — and more useful — to criticise the things you like in the hope that they will improve, rather than spending all your time criticising something you don't like that will never listen to you.

That said, it's still important to take the time to sing the praises of something you like. If Ebert had spent all his time talking down bad films, reading his columns would have been painful drudgery (see also: CinemaSins, Nostalgia Critic, and similar attempts at film-criticism-by-cynicism). A good critic wants their target to succeed, and celebrates when that happens.

Oh the irony - Sometimes people need to stfu and root for something without pointing out how it could be better. "Awesome! Did you think about..... STFU!"

If you're a real critic, absolutely. But most of what passes for criticism today is just hindsight dressed up as insight. It ignores the fact that choices are made in a fog, assumes outcomes were inevitable, and retroactively assigns blame. It feels like scorekeeping not being a rational/fair critic.

The truth is that for many people criticism and contrarianism serves an extremely simple function: It allows them to sound smart and distinguish themselves from others.

And that explains 90% of all the criticism that has ever been given.

Yeah, I live in sweden and a compliment by a swede about how I play music is completely meaningless to me. On the other hand a compliment from my bosnian or croatian friends is a big deal.

> I really believe in the importance of praising people and acknowledging their efforts, when they are...

alive!

At a funeral of a controversial activist, where all the living activist sang their praise, I watch their child stand up and say "...where were you all when my dad was alive"

I now go out of my way to tell people I admire them, if I do, while they are still here.

Critics could be experts of past era who have seen it all and are now seeing the same mistakes being repeated.

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again. -- André Gide

Behan's criticism of critics then makes him an eunuch who's criticizing eunuchs... according to his own "logic".

Harems did not had much of heterosexual sex going on in them. Whole point was gender segregation. Eunuch in harem have seen women, but did not seen them having sex with men.

I think the key distinction is between critics and cynics. Critics serve a purpose that provides value, whereas cynics are just all-around bummers who negatively impact the world around them.

Critics maybe. Antagonists no.

it's easier to image a dystopia than an eutopia, or even utopia, depending how you see it

[flagged]

Not entirely sure what you mean. Care to expound?

Are you talking about people who act out on their fandom by criticizing others? "Oh I'm a fan of X, therefore I'm a vocal critic of Y". I agree that such things are toxic -- fandom doesn't need to be a polemic.

I want to cultivate the kind of fandom that builds up without feeling a need to tear down others.

I advocate for going to a Hurricanes game :) loudest barn in the NHL, baby!

> We have too much fake-niceness, and we are over-enthused quite often on things that turn out to be nothing, at least in the U.S. We don't need more of it, at least IMO.

I don't think the original article is advocating for "fake niceness". It's advocating for enthusiastic uplift. That spirit that tends to pervade small hobbyist communities, where everyone is iterating and building on everyone else. If you've been in the 3d printing space over the last decade or so, there's plenty of honest criticism and knowledgable discussion. But it's also infectiously enthusiastic and there's a sense of exploration and desire to see everyone* succeed that's very genuine. Things don't always succeed or work out, but it's pretty rare to encounter hard "that's stupid, you're stupid and you should feel bad" sort of commentary.

Compare this to the broader tech community as it appears in places like HN. Open any thread on someone's new project or experiment here and count the number of comments that are genuinely positive and encouraging vs the number that are nit-picking for the sake of nit-picking, dismissive and just generally unhappy or are outright actively tearing down the item in question. Even the ones that are "Oh this is nice, but hey you could do XYZ to improve it" very rarely have any follow up that submits the suggested improvements, even when the original item is an open source project that they clearly could submit improvements to. People love to talk about the shortcomings, but unlike "fans" rarely tend to put out the time and effort to make it better.

It's bad enough that my general approach to HN these days is to only read the articles and make an effort to avoid the comment threads or at a minimum make sure I've read the original link in its entirety and thought about my own opinions of it before heading into the comments. And when I find something in a project that I think could be improved, I make an effort to ensure that I'm putting proper effort into trying to improve it, either with a patch/fix or if I'm incapable of patching/fixing, as much detail and testing as I can document in order to have contributed more than just a drive by criticism.

Also, I'm not sure a "too much niceness", fake or otherwise, is the problem in the US right now.

Thanks for posting this. I learn some about the topic as I am not very good receiving criticism.

I imagine being a healthy critic is a skill, something personal to be worked on.

It’s just so easy to be critical and even if you have good intentions, being critical can take the wind out of a dreamers sails.

Feeling good about things has nothing to do with liking or disliking something though. I dislike things about the Rust language and the larger ecosystem around it (things like async/await as the dominant concurrency model, or the separate and very different macro syntaxes), but I'm still a fan of seeing rust projects and things people do in and with Rust. If someone builds a database driver built on Tokio, no one (not eve me) benefits from me doing drive by "async/await is complex and annoying, you should have done this differently" criticism. I may think that, and I may not like a Tokio based driver. But I don't have to "feel bad" about it, and neither do the creators. Feeling bad about it won't make a non Tokio driver appear. Nor will just criticizing Tokio and Async/Await. For something different and better to appear, I have build enthusiasm for an alternative and I have to engage with the parts I do like. Spending a hour building the starts of a a non Tokio driver and giving it to other enthusiastic people would be a far more effective use of my time than spending an hour writing a take down of async/await and giving it to other like minded critics. The phrase "preaching to the choir" comes to mind, and too often these days I feel like criticism online is largely geared towards exactly that. Polemics for people who already agree with the author, about some thing that the author dislikes.

I feel this is a culture problem that can be localized on a per organization basis. If people are getting promoted for be douche bags you're working at the wrong organization. We feed sociopathy by our choices.

> It's so hard to to believe in people or have a positive opinion of them when much of my interactions are negative. Or when people who embody the opposite of goodness are promoted and have status. It's like we live in a society in which mediocrity, borderline sociopathy, and meanness are rewarded.

Which I think is why the original article has an important idea. We need to be fans more and encourage that as a way of thinking. If mediocrity and borderline sociopathy are rewarded by society at large, it must mean that mediocrity and borderline sociopathy are rewarded by society in the small. And sure enough, take a look around (and look at pop culture over the last couple decades) and you'll see that's true:

* American "Kitchen Nightmares" took what was an often genuinely heartfelt show about struggling restaurants in its UK incarnation and turned it into a circus side show complete with jeering at the freaks.

* Reality competition shows thrive on marketing terrible performances and smug take downs by Simon Cowell and his various low rent knockoffs.

* The Daily Show / John Oliver thrives on the sort of smug "I'm better than these obvious idiots, and wink wink you are too because you watch me and we know we're very smart" behavior that ironically also powers the Glenn Beck / Rush Limbaugh contingent on the other side of the spectrum.

* Trump himself made his own reality TV show where the entire premise was just firing people for not being sufficiently subservient.

* And remember things like "The Weakest Link"?

We've built a culture over the years, that has turned large swaths of the internet from small communities of fans and enthusiasts to large communities of "take down" artists and drive by clap backs a la twitter. We promote criticism and boarderline sociopathy on a daily basis and hold it up as an ideal to strive for, and turn to "You just can't handle the truth" whenever someone calls it out. Is it any wonder then that the people that are rising to the top in a world that promotes crab bucket mentality are the biggest and meanest crabs?

But if we don't work to be different in the small. If we don't try in our day to day efforts even when it's extremely difficult to do so, to be kind, positive, and enthusiastic, where do we expect that behavior to come from in our leaders and the people we promote? If "harsh truth" people who "say what they want" and "don't care about your feels" are the sort of people we lift up at the bottom, why do we expect it to be any different the higher up we go?